Ammo Quest 380: Precision One XTP bare gel test

12th in a series of a quest to find the overall best ammunition for modern micro-compact 380 ACP pistols (such as the Taurus TCP 738, the Ruger LCP or S&W Bodyguard or any other popular 380 micro-pistol using a barrel length of around 2.8"). I am putting several of today's most popular hollowpoints to the test, determining how well they penetrate and expand into the ballistics gel when fired from the TCP. In this installment, I am testing the Precision One 90-grain XTP jacketed hollow points.

In this test, I actually got six rounds in the block, and the ammo performed superbly. The penetration was an average of more than 13.8" for all six shots, all of which successfully expanded. Chronograph and penetration results were quite consistent round-to-round.

Also in this episode, I introduce a corroborating mathematical formula, the Quantitative Ammunition Selection (QAS) formula (by Charles Schwartz) for predicting bullet penetration in ballistic gel. Adding this formula to the results will help us correct for excessive "bounceback" where the bullets penetrate deeply but bounce back into the gel, thus coming to rest at excessively shallow penetration. The Quantitative Ammunition Selection formula is available in book form at www.quantitativeammunitionselection.com.

While these Precision One rounds performed excellently in this bare gelatin test, that's not the final word on the subject. We will have to see how rounds perform through the IWBA 4-layer-denim test too. Certain selected rounds that performed well in the bare gel tests will be advanced to the "final round", where the denim test will be used, and the results from both bare and denim-clothed gelatin will be used to determine an overall winner.

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